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fact anb Ubeon? papers* 



NUMBER II. 

THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD" 

By APPLETON MORGAN 



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a - **,** ff^ct anD Tlheovy papers. 






THE SOCIETY AND THE FAD" 



BEING 

AN AMPLIFICATION OF AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

SHAKESPEARE CLUB OF NEW YORK CITY, 

nov. i, i88q 



BY 

APPLETON MORGAN, 

President of the New York Shakespeare Society 



NEW YORK : 

N. D. C. HODGES 

47 Lafayette Place 

1890 




lHic 



Gift 
D. of State 

6 DfM 



THE SOCIETY A~KD THE "FAD." 



In a very recent issue of a young ladies' magazine (pic- 
turesquely called Poet-Lore) there lately met my eye the fol- 
lowing sentence: "Browning and Ibsen are the only really 
dramatic authors < f their century." As things sometimes 
strongly suggest their opposites, this sentence reminded me 
of one of Professor TyndalTs splendid chapters, the one en- 
titled " The Scientific Use of the Imagination ;" which chap- 
ter quotes as its text the following passage from an address 
of Sir Benjamin Brodie to the Boyal Society: " Physical in- 
vestigation, more than any thing besides, helps to teach us 
the actual value and right use of the imagination, — of that 
wondrous faculty, which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads 
us astray into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, — a 
land of mists and shadows,— but which, properly controlled 
by experience and reflection, becomes the noblest attribute 
of man, the source of poetic genius, the instrument of dis- 
covery in science, without the aid of which Newton would 
never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed 
the earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have found 
another continent " 



2 THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 

There is a use of the imagination which is of prophetic 
value: as, for example, the use which a poet like Goethe 
makes of it when he foresees, in his poetry, that which the 
sciences shall in due time arrange for, and the arts accom- 
plish Goethe himself expresses this, — 

" Thus in the roaring loom of Time I ply, 
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by." 

There is also that nearer use of the imagination which is of 
immediate commercial importance, as when the promoter of 
a continental railway sees, in his mind's eye, a location 
through yawning canons, and trackless forests on unbeaten 
mountain-sides, where his locomotives may clamber. And 
there is yet a third use of the imagination, which discerns 
enough importance in material and passing things ' which to 
the general of his date seem trivial and valueless) to lead the 
poet to preserve and chronicle them, and so perpetuate 
that which otherwise would disappear, and be lost forever 
to the student of humanity and of history. Poetry, then, in 
the latter case, has its practical as well as its sentimental 
uses, and it is not a matter of supererogation that organiza- 
tions of individuals should meet to study and interpret the 
works of a poet as well as the works of a publicist or a phi- 
losopher. But when the poetry of a certain poet, however 
magnificent, is merely delineation of, or soliloquy concern- 
ing, that of which all the race is tenant in common along with 
the poet, it would seem as if the organization of a great so- 
ciety or a learned academy to penetrate that particular poetry 
or that particular poet was rather what we call a " fad," or a 
crochet, than a work of any value to anybody. To illustrate the 
situation by use of an honored name (to which name I have 
no wish to allude other than with the highest respect : the 
death of Mr. Robert Browning has terminated what I think 
is one of the most wonderful— certainly the most unprece- 
dented — phenomena in literature; namely, the spectacle of 



THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. 7 6 

a poet writing" poetry, and of the simultaneous organization 
on two continents of learned societies to comprehend that 
poetry as fast as it was written. Indeed, the remark of the 
witty person — that, just as great physical works are beyond 
the capacity of individuals, and so must be intrusted to cor- 
porations, so the comprehension of Mr. Browning's poetry, 
being beyond the single intellect, was committed to aggre 
gations of intellect known as " Browning Societies" — ap- 
pears to have been less a bon mot, and much nearer the 
truth, than had been generally supposed ; for Dr. Furnivall 
tells us why he founded the original Browning Society. 
44 The main motive for taking the step," says the excellent 
doctor, u was some talk and writing of a certain cymbal- 
tinkler being a greater poet (that is, maker) than Browning. 
I couldn't stand that! " which rather appears to be only an- 
other way of .saying that Browning was in danger of being 
neglected, simply because people could not readily ascertain 
whether there was any thing in him to study; and so that 
organizations must be formed, not to study something or 
other that was in him, but to find out if that something or 
ether was there. 

What I propose in this paper is an attempt to show, that— 
unlike the Browning Society — the Shakespeare Society is not 
an institution of this character, not organized to worship 
Shakespeare, or to study the Shakespearian method and form : 
but that it is an institution productive of real benefit, be- 
cause its purpose is to study the matter (the material) in 
which Shakespeare deals; because we know that this matter 
is in him without the organization of any preliminary pars- 
ing societies — simply because, so unapproachably simple 
and coherent and scientific is his form, that we are able 
at a glance to ascertain whether he is worth studying or 
not. 

Indeed, it would appear, from this very statement of the 
founder of Browning societies, that he himself perfectly well 



4 THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 

understood that a study of Browning merely meant a study 
of the particular Browning expression, fashion, method, 
form (or neglect of form, of which Browning himself boasts 
in his " The Inn Album "). And, if this were the excellent 
founder's meaning, we can well understand that he was 
right: for certainly, if Mr. Browning's own contemporary 
must quarry in Mr. Browning's poetry — must go at him with 
pick and spade just as a twenty-second century grammarian 
might do, he must not expect the yield he unearths to be 
any secret of his own century, — any thing not already his 
own property in common w T ith Browning himself; any thing 
he did not know before, or could not have procured with 
less or equal labor elsewhere, — for certainly Mr. Brown- 
ing had no sources of information, or access to sources 
of information, which his contemporaries did and do 
not enjoy or cannot procure. What the Browning 
Society occupies itself with, then, must be exactly that 
which, had Shakespeare societies been organized during 
Shakespeare's lifetime or immediately after his death, those 
societies would have been occupied with as to Shakespeare. 
The Shakespeare societies of 1600-16 would have found 
themselves in precisely the same position as to their poet as 
are our Browning societies to theirs. Their aim would have 
necessarily been, not to learn about their own century, about 
their own manners, their own customs, their own emotions, 
sensations, habits and speech, from the writings of one of 
themselves — but would have been limited simply to a study 
and interpretation of William Shakespeare's expression 
of his delineation of those customs, sensations, and emo- 
tions. 

The Shakespeare Society of our day, as I understand it, 
has no such purpose as that outlined above. it is not 
founded and maintained in order tD study, still less to wor- 
ship, either Shakespeare the man, or Shakespeare the ex- 
pressionist Still less than either, I may remark in passing, 



THE SOCIETY AND THE < 4 FAD. ' 5 

is the Shakespeare Society organized to translate Shakespeare 
into the vernacular of the nineteenth century. As a matter 
of fact, Shakespeare's language is actually nearer our own 
than is that of any writer of any century preceding ours. 
Attempts to paraphrase usually end in obscuring him. 
There is not a sentence in the plays the drift and point of 
which — however an obsolete word, or archaic construction, 
or typographical error therein, may occasionally baffle us — 
is not perfectly intelligible. The Shakespeare Society is 
formed, rather, to study the age and customs in which and 
among which Shakespeare lived and wrote: the Shake- 
speare Society, in other words, is an antiquarian society, 
which has limited its researches to that the most interesting 
age of the English speaking world, — the age in which those 
modern institutions which we prize most — art, manners, 
letters, society, jurisprudence, the common law which pro- 
tects all these — were all springing to birth; of which institu- 
tions, it seems, William Shakespeare epitomized the very 
life, fibre, and b^ing; leaving behind him not only a litera- 
ture for the library and the student, but a record to which 
the historian, the politician, the man of science himself, are 
eager to square themselves. And again: since the dramatic 
is the highest form of literature, and since Shakespeare 
made it so, the Shakespeare Society is also a dramatic so- 
ciety, and nothing which is dramatic should be alienated 
from it. At least, such was the belief of the first Shakespeare 
Society, founded in London by such gentlemen as the late 
honored James Orchard Halliwell (since Halli well-Phillips \ 
John Payne Collier, William Harness, Alexander Dyce, 
Douglas Jerrold, Bolton Corney, Charles Dickens, Peter 
Cunningham, Henry Hallam, and others. Harder-headed 
men than the above enumerated surely never came to- 
gether; and if any one will take the trouble to look over 
the titles of the publications of this first Shakespeare Society, 
he will at least be conscientiously unable to continue to jeer 



6 THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 

at that Shakespearian Society as a mutual admiration as- 
sembly. Those publications are entirely devoted to the 
preservation of such literary matter, records or chronicles, 
as throw, or threw then, a new light upon the Elizabethan 
and Jacobean ages, whose central figure William Shake- 
speare undoubtedly was. I do not know, had "aesthetic 
criticism 1 ' been then, invented, whether or not the above- 
named gentlemen would have succumbed to its temptations; 
but I find it very hard to imagine that they would have so 
succumbed. I find it very hard to imagine Halli well-Phillips 
and Charles Dickens and Henry Hallam "lying among the 
daisies, and discoursing in novel phrases of the complicated 
state of mind" of William Shakespeare. I am quite sure, 
indeed, that William Shakespeare himself would have been 
the very last to accept the "creative 1 ' or "aesthetic" (it is the 
same thing) criticism of the present period; which reads all 
sorts of sublime eschatological and moral moods, motives, 
and purposes into the few honest, direct, and laborious years 
which he passed in the busy London of Elizabeth and her 
successor, — passed there, at first in a struggle to earn his 
daily bread as a stranger in the crowded streets; then, later, 
to accumulate a fortune with which, like Horace's ideal 
gentleman, "far from the noise of trade" to retire to his boy- 
hood's home, and "plough with oxen the fields of his ances- 
tors." Blink the fact as we may: — insist on Shakespeare's 
moral purposes and immense visions of didactic services to 
his race as we may :" still the fact remains that all the im- 
mortal plays were written in the course of this struggle, 
first for bread and then for wealth, and that William Shake- 
speare himself was, not only a poet and a dramatist, but a 
practical mounter of plays, and maintainer of theatres and 
theatrical companies, and lived and died so utterly uncon- 
scious that he had done any thing more than any other play- 
right, that he never made the slightest effort to perpetuate 
a line he had ever written, and took no notice in his will of 



THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. ' ' 7 

any thing but his farms, his curtilages, and his cash. This 
is no place to give a list of the publications of that first 
Shakespeare Society; but I happen to recall one of them, a 
reproduction of the long-lost and forgotten cartoons which 
Inigo Jones drew in freehand to guide the designers and 
court carpenters in mounting certain masques for the enter- 
tainment of royalty; and this one publication may stanJ 
here for all the rest. Not in all those thirty or forty vol- 
umes was there any posing of Shakespeare as a missionary, 
or dogmatic philosopher teaching moral, or aesthetic, or 
platonic, or any other sort of doctrines to his race. He 
(Shakespeare) may be a great moral teacher to-day; but, 
had he been "a great moral teacher" in his own day, he 
would have played his companies to empty houses. In 
short, the purpose of the first Shakespeare Society was: what 
in my opinion the purpose of every Shakespeare club or so- 
ciety to-day should be: to illustrate rather than supply, and 
to preserve rather than to create. Here, then, is the point. 
Shakespeare was, however unwittingly, what we call "scien- 
tific" in the use of his imagination, not only because he 
wrote fully up to the despotic requirements of a stage and a 
scenic art which he could only imagine (since it was to be 
born centuries after his funeral), but because he selected for 
perpetuation, out of his own environment, — out of the riff- 
raff as well as the splendor, the lewd and vulgar as well as 
the lofty and the romantic, — that which was formative and 
genuine, and that of which — because it was formative and 
genuine, and not illusive and temporary — the centuries be- 
yond him would be interested to study and inquire. Ben 
Jonson and his associate dramatists were on the ground just 
as Shakespeare was: they had precisely the access to their 
contemporary civilization that Shakespeare had; they pre- 
served the fashions and the fads (what Aubrey called "the 
coxcombities") of their date just as well as Shakespeare did. 
But, since they were not vouchsafed what Sir Benjamin 



8 THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 

Brodie calls "the scientific imagination ," as well as the 
romantic and dramatic imagination, they could not and did 
not know " which seed would grow, and which would not.'' 
The Elizabethan dramatists did not, as a rule, it seems, know 
to which "airy nothings" to give the "local habitation" and 
"name" which succeeding centuries should found academies 
and societies to investigate. Glorious as was the age they 
lived in, their eyes, as a rule, were sealed to the possibilities 
which were being born around them. Only to one among 
them was it given to body forth and turn to shapes the 
forms which should be valuable to posterity, — those actual, 
practical, and scientific forms which we throng our own 
theatres to-day to se^ with our own physical eyes, and which 
we organize our Shakespeare societies to study and to illus- 
trate. 

This, then, is the situation. Because Shakespeare held the 
mirror up to the nature which environed him: because he 
became the chronicler of those manners, societies, and civili- 
zations of his Elizabethan day which were the germs of our 
own, it is worth while to organize societies to study him in 
every aspect and from every point of view. The Shelley 
society or the Browning society, on the, other hand, has and 
will have only the form, the expression, the mood, of its 
poet to in vestigate and debate ; for the material in which Shel- 
ley and Browning worked is not unique or personal either to 
Browning or to Shelley. Their preserve is just exactly the 
preserve of all other poets : — the Humanities, which are always 
to the fore, always the same, and always the quarry of con- 
temporary poets. And the poet who appears to-day, or who 
shall appear to-morrow, will be more apt, I think, to write 
works which the centuries to come after him shall not will- 
ingly let die, if he looks for his Pociety to be organized in 
those centuries rather than to-day or to-morrow; and this 
because it is only the centuries to come after him which 
shall be competent to decide whether his work was fit to 



THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. ' ' 9 

live, or was only the thing of the moment, — "the tune of 
the time," as Lamkt called Osric's nourishes. 

Perhaps— in the flood of intellectual commentary and the 
analysis of Shakespeare's melody, eloquence, and literary 
style — attention has not been sufficiently attracted to this 
practical scientific form, — this "local habitation" which 
Shakespeare gave to his imagination, — how, with this scien- 
tific use of his imagination, he actually realized and pro- 
vided for, not only the possibilities of the stage carpenter 
(an unknown functionary in his day), but that very modern 
opulence of modern stage architecture and effect which at- 
tracts us to our own theatres. Nobody can fail to be im- 
pressed, in witnessing modern Shakespearian revival, with 
the fact that the costliest and most prodigal of stage mount- 
ing which can be lavished upon a Shakespeare play on our 
metropolitan stage actually requires no amplification, or em- 
bellishment, or enlargement, of the text,action or situations, to 
justify it; and that the stage directions of the acting editions of 
Shakespeare to day are only those implied, if not expressed, 
in the text as Shakespeare himself left it. We have seen 
the splendors of Mr. Rignold's " Henry the Fifth," and of 
Mr. Booth's and Mr. Wilson Barrett's and Mr. Irving's 
"Hamlet," " Othello," and "Merchant of Venice," and of 
Mr. Daly's "Merry Wives of Windsor," "Taming of the 
Shrew," and "Midsummer Night's Dream;" but it should 
never be left unrealized that this dramatic author, who — three 
centuries ago — wrought out this dramatic material, never saw, 
except in imagination, and without the slightest rudimen- 
tary attempt at stage effect to guide his vision, all this ma- 
chinery which his work to-day, and for our eyes, so impera- 
tively demands. 

The stage contrivances of Bottom's company — the man 
besmeared with loam to represent a wall, the man with a 
lantern and a dog to represent a moon — were scarcely bur- 
lesques upon the meanness and poverty, the petty economies 



10 THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ; FAD. ' ' 

and pitiable makeshifts, of the stage as Shakespeare himself 
knew it. I was most particularly impressed, in witnessing 
Mr. Daly's reproduction of l 'The Merry Wives of Windsor," 
with Mr. Daly's success in intimating this, without demean- 
ing the effect of his own lavish stage machinery. Of course, 
the room in Ford's house in which Falstaff meets the ladies, 
was — in the day to be represented — strewn with rushes (about 
a century was to elapse before interior luxury had even sug- 
gested sand). The ceilings were low and the timbers hewn, 
and the decorations moslly confined to an arrangement of 
the table utensils: trenchers, tankards, pots, and jugs. But 
to bring to his audiences the idea of the house of a thriving 
tradesman who had amassed tk legions of angels," and so to 
tell the story of Falstaff's motives, Mr. Daly, of course, 
made the room a beautiful interior with carved furniture 
and wainscotings, and covered the floor with costly rugs. 
Shakespeare's own plays were not only mounted upon, 
but were immediately written for, a barren platform, where, 
if a couch was drawn in to signify a bed-chamber, or a table 
and two stools to signify an inn taproom, it was the force of 
a realism which could no further go. It was a company 
like the clown companies in " Love's Labour's Lost " or the 
ik Midsummer Night's Dream," oftener than a company of 
"Burbkdges or of Lowins, that spoke Shakespeare's mighty 
lines in the ear of Shakespeare himself; and his majestic and 
noble and tender women were, perforce, intrusted to beard- 
less and callow boys, in days when for a woman to play a 
woman's part was an ineffable disgrace. The modern stage 
at the height of its opulence, is, then, but the imagination 
and the prophetic mind of Shakespeare; and Shakespeare 
was not only summit of the dramatic creator, but of the 
dramatic art, as well. Like the projector of the continental 
railway, who sits in his saddle in the primeval forest and 
sees his vestibuled palace coaches, and hears his panting lo- 
comotives, Shakespeare stood upon his rude stage in the 



THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 11 

uncouth barn they called a play-house, and foresaw all that 
three centuries could amass of stage opulence and the lavish- 
ness of scenic art; and there and then he devised the situa- 
tions, and moulded into poetry the dialogue which should 
describe and justify that opulence and that summit of dra- 
matic art. There and then he bodied forth the form of 
things unknown — turned them to shapes, and gave to airy 
nothings a local habitation and a name. I do not say he 
knew what he saw, or knew that he was so writing for that 
which was to be his future. I do not know whether he did 
or not; but the result is here to day. 

Certainly this age, and the ages to come, may well organ- 
ize into academies to study the mind and the workmanship 
of a man and a poetry like these. 

Now, if Shakespeare has a rival ; if there is another poet 
who builds and creates and preserves : and who — with a use 
of the imagination which we may thus properly call scien- 
tific — supplies not only his own generation and contempora- 
ries, but generations yet to be born, with that which is use- 
ful (in that it can be acted) and beautiful (in that it can be 
admired) in poetry, — thjn let us organize an academy to 
that poet also; let societies be founded in his honor; and 
the less time we lose in the work, the better it will be for us. 
Have we such another poet? Is it Robert Browning? If 
there is any truth declared, or any discovery announced, in 
Mr. Browning's poetry, except the ordinary humanities with 
which all poetry deals, — the loveliness of virtue, the deadli- 
ness of vice, etc. (matters rather settled by this time, and as 
to which further testimony or didactic illustration is merely 
cumulative), — if there is, then by all means let us have 
Browning societies, and plenty of them. But if there is not; 
if it should appear that the great attractiveness of Robert 
Browning's poetry, the real reason why a taste for it has 
been sufficient to make it develop into a fad, and why 
the study of it associates worthy and excellent people into 

L<rfC 



12 THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 

societies and clubs: has always been and is, simply that 
its meaning" is not (like the meaning of Shakespeare's po- 
etry, for example) apparent on its face: that it is not per- 
fectly intelligible, that nouns are situated at long distances 
from their predicates, and that verbs, adverbs, pronouns, 
prepositions, and various other parts of speech, are under- 
stood from their absence or are to be guessed at from the 
tumultuous context; should it appear that, were Mr. Brown- 
ing's poetry paraphrased into perfectly commonplace Eng- 
lish, each noun and verb in its place, every substantive and 
predicate in their proper order — there would be no Browning 
societies; — then, I submit, it would seem as if Mr. Browning's 
poetry was and is, nothing but cumulative poetry. And the 
question arises whether your Browning societies are any 
thing more than societies for the working out of conun- 
drums, or puzzles, or rebuses; not, perhaps, adult parsing 
societies, but societies organized to ask what well-known 
sentiment could Mr. Browning have intended to express in 
these five w T ords, what perfectly familiar proposition of mor- 
als did he mean to restate by those six, etc. I do not by any 
means say that this is the case, or that Browning is not a 
great original poet for other reasons than a somewhat com- 
plicated syntax. I am only taking the liberty of using him, 
with the permission of his admirers, as an illustration; just 
as I have used Shakespeare as an illustration of a poet whose 
works have lived because (as I think) they are not purely 
didactic, or purely cumulative of examples of those princi- 
ples and. tendencies with which the world, since the date of 
its emergence from chaos, has been perfectly familiar. 

Is it not a fact, that if, three hundred years from this 
date, a twenty -second century man should come across one 
of Mr. Harrigan's dramatic pieces (one of the u Mulligan'' 
series, for example), he would find in it more chronicle of 
the familiar manners of the nineteenth century than he w r ill 
find in Mr. Browning's poetry ? Should the twenty-second 



THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 13 

century sociologist or philologist be interested in the city of 
New York, for example, will he not be more instructed by 
one of Mr. Harrigan's " Mulligan" plays than by reitera- 
tions, however antiquarian their sources, of those truths of hu- 
man nature with which doubtless his own twenty-second cen- 
tury literature will teem? Men and women are pretty much 
alike in any century, have always been and doubtless al- 
ways will be— the same passions, motives, and frailties. The 
comparative safety of virtue, and perilousness of vice; that 
goodness is rewarded and badness punished, — are items 
which doubtless the twenty-second century reader will con- 
cede as freely as we do. Nor will a narrative, however dis- 
tinctly re-teaching those admirable lessons, become solely on 
that account immortal. The twenty-second century man 
will doubtless be fairly aware of the average moral proba- 
bilities. But, should be be a student of intellectual progress, 
or curious as to the Browning century, and desire to learn 
about this nineteenth-century poet's Ancerican cousins (to 
learn about as much of them as Shakespeare has dropped as 
to his own contemporary Dutchman and Frenchman and 
Spaniard); should he happen to direct his inquiries as to 
what were the manners (not of superior persons, but of the 
general) in the metropolis of the western nineteenth-century 
world; should he unearth its motley mise en scene, where 
Christian, Jew, and Pagan, where Occidental, Oriental, and 
African (white, yellow, and black), were all massed in 
good-natured communion, — he would find in one of Mr. 
Harrigan's pieces as rich a storehouse of folk-lore; and an- 
notate it as eagerly and as learnedly; as we annotate the 
u Comedy of Errors " or the "Merry Wives of Windsor." 
He would make notes upon the fact that such interesting 
ellipses as li Go chase yourself around the block," or " Take 
a drop, will you?" were an invitation to over-much preten- 
sion to descend from its stilts, with quite as much appetite, 
for example, as we to-day discover that such " sabre cuts of 



14 THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. ' ' 

Saxon speech" as u painting the town red," * or to " fire 
out," 2 or " to shake," 3 or " It's a cold day " 4 (meaning a day 
of disappointment), or u too thin," 5 are actually resurrec- 
tions from the Shakespearian day and date. 

And this, possibly, may be where the line is to be drawn 
between the usefulness of a poet or a dramatist to his own 
generation and date, and his value as an embalmer of man- 
ners to generations and dates long beyond him. Indeed, the 
very first piece of Shakespearian criticism extant 6 (it was 
written by John Aubrey prior to the year 1680, and I cannot 
see that the criticism of these two hundred or so years since, 
has practically done any thing more than indorse it) repre- 
sents Shakespeare in London in his own day, doing just ex- 
actly what Mr. Harrigan in New York has done in his. 
Shakespeare, who wrote tk Hamlet," did not scruple to take 
his auditors into the tavern, the inn-yard, the bagnio, the 
jail; into the bum-bailiff's and the watchman's court, just 
as Mr. Harrigan has escorted his audiences into the slums, 
the opium-joints, the bar-rooms, the ten-cent lodging-houses, 
to the polls, the picnics, the chowder-parties, and the cheap 
excursions of the self-respecting newsboy and boot-black 
The ears of Mr. Harrigan's audiences are treated less coarse- 
ly than were those of Shakespeare. The nineteenth-century 
theatre-goer takes its Shakespeare extremely Bowdlerized. 
Doubtless Shakespeare went to a great many places where 
he should not, and where, had a Shakespeare society for the 
transcendental illumination of his works kept at his heels, 
he perhaps could not or would not have gone. But it is 

1 1 Henry IV., II. iv. 13. 2 Sonnet, cxliv. 14; Passionate Pilgrim, ii. 14. 

3 Lear, I. i. 42. 4 Cymbeline, II. iii. ; 2 Henry VI., I. i. 237. 

& Henry VIII., V. iii. 125. 

6 "He did gather humours of men daily, his comedies will remain witt as 
long as the English language is spoken, for that he handles mores hominum. 
He took in the humour of the constable at Grendon-in-Bucks which is on the 
road from London to Stratford. 11 



TfiE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. ' ' 15 

precisely because he did go to all these places, good or bad , 
untrammelled, that his pages are of such peculiar value to 
ourselves: preserving so much that but for him had been 
misunderstood, but which he recognized as worth the em- 
balming; not minimizing for the sake of ears polite, nor yet 
distorting into prominence for the prurient, but simply em- 
balming — life size, as it was, and where it belonged — iu the 
great comedie humaine of those matchless dramas. From 
courtier to courtezan, from commander to camp-follower, 
the sovereign, the soldier, the statesman, the merchant, the 
peasant, the clown — how they all talked and walked, and 
lived and died, Shakespeare has told us. King Henry dis- 
cusses state-craft with his great ministers ; we turn the page, 
and Pistol and Doll Tear-sheet are hurling Billingsgate at each 
other, with Falstaff as a mocking peacemaker; two carriers 
with lanterns are shifting their packs in an inn-yard, and 
talking of poor Robin, the last hostler, who is dead; an- 
other page, and Lady Percy, in Wark worth Castle, is plead- 
ing with the noble Hotspur to dwell less upon wars and big 
events, 

" Of sallies, and retires; of trenches, tents, 

Of palisados, frontiers, parapets; 
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin ; 

Of prisoner's ransoms, and of soldiers slain, 
And all the currents of a heady fight " — 

and to give some thought to wife and home and family. 
And in every one of these thirty-seven dramas there is the 
same rush of movement, the same panorama of life, of color, 
and of action — untrammelled and unmterfered with by any 
slightest hint that the poet preferred or enjoyed any one 
movement, class, or color, or life, to any other, — a simple 
photograph — and a negative untouched! And still from out 
this panorama may biographies be written, and still histories 
and sociologies unfolded, simply because this negative has 
not been tampered with. Here, too, is a faithful transcript 



16 THE SOCIETY AND THE < ■ FAD. ' ' 

of the progress of the date; of the procession in which Shake- 
speare was marching along with the rest ; and it is worth 
our while to pause a moment for an example of it. Observe 
that in the first quarto of " Hamlet " (1603) we have a sta^e 
direction, "Enter King, Queen, Corambis, and other lords;" 
in the second (1604) this entry is directed to be accompanied 
with " trumpets and kettle drums;" but, in 1623, the words 
" Danish March " are added to this stage direction. Here is 
a steady progress in realism: the play being Danish, the 
march was to be Danish also. Again in 2 Henry VI. in its 
first quarto form ( u The Contention" etc.), 1594, Suffolk 
says to his captor, — 

c ' Hast thou not waited at my trencher, 

When I have feasted with Queen Margaret ? ' ' 

But, in the folio some thirty years later, Suffolk says, 

1 4 How often hast thou waited at my cup 
Fed from my trencher/ ' 

This is a step in table etiquette. It came to be only the 
servant, and not the nobleman, who used the trencher. The 
procession marches past us, — the lewd, the unpleasant the 
coarse: along with the noble, the stately, the refined. It is 
all in perspective, and the perspective of Shakespeare is the 
perspective of history. 

And so: because these pages of Shakespeare are crowded 
with data for the student of civilization: are not a single 
phase (much less a phrase)— of literature — not puzzles or 
rebuses to find the meaning of which is beyond the single 
intellect, but for which societies and clubs and guessing-par 
ties must be formed: therefore it is that a society for the il- 
lustration of Shakespeare, and of the field of research which 
his name implies, is not the fad or fashion of the moment. Its 

ork is not to worry and debate and wrangle as to the mean- 
ng of this or that or the other, ellipsis: or as to what truth 



w 



THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. M 17 

of human nature the poet intended to refer in this or that or 
the other, monologue, or cryptogram, or episode, or epigram : 
its work is simply to trace — from the cuf s they find in the 
plays of Shakespeare — the origin of things now familiar, of 
institutions now important, and of customs still fraught with 
significance. So long as there is a substance to work, let us 
have the society and the academy to work it. It matters 
not much if the student's exuberance overbear him, or his 
commentary burst into apotheosis: what it behooves him, 
rather, to beware of, is a confounding of the scientific uses 
of the imagination with that considerable over-use of 
the imagination which in time becomes the febrile, not 
the scientific vision. To see the Spanish fleet which is not 
yet in sight requires only faith. It will materialize with 
patience; but — for those who see insight and introspection 
and dramatic power in whatever is beneath their analysis, 
in whatever they cannot parse, or (and I am not now speak- 
ing of Mr. Browning) which offends the ear polite — not faith, 
but the faith-cure, is the proper specific. Cumulative poetry 
may have its uses, but it is hardly worth while to organize 
societies to discuss it. 

I beg to repeat that I have only used Mr. Browning and 
his poetry as illustrations, in this paper. I am very far from 
wishing to be understood as implying that both are not 
great, or that I do not honor the memory of the one or admire 
the majestic qualities of the other. Still less do I propose 
attempting prophecy on my own account, by asserting that 
in three centuries, or one century, from this date, great so 
cieties and colleges will not be incorporated to sit at the feet 
of Robert Browning's poetry, and to write volumes of aes- 
thetic criticism, and to fill libraries with controversial biog- 
raphies of Mr. Browning. 

Not to make too much of the pronouncement, then, in the 
young ladies' magazine picturesquely called Poet-Lore, 1 that 

i March, 1890. 



18 THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 

" Browning' and Ibsen are the only two really dramatic 
authors of this century," it is as good a text, perhaps, 
as any other upon which to protest, not against the fad po- 
etic (which is an institution, that, with one excuse or an- 
other, — Browning, Tolstoi, or Ibsen, — is, like the poor, al- 
ways with us), but against this cruel misuse of the word 
44 dramatic," and this (perhaps I may call it) over "bump- 
tiGus' 1 employment of the prophetic vision, which magnifies 
our own taste of the moment into a judgment as to the prob- 
able opinions of posterity. 

Certainly Browning is a dramatic poet, if writing plays 
that cannot be acted constitutes one a dramatic poet. (The 
answer to this is, of course, that Browning's dramas have 
been acted : an equivalent argument would prove that women 
are men, because, once in a while, certain women have acted 
like men.) And as to Ibsen: well, one swallow makes a 
summer — sometimes; and the Ibsen craze is some weeks old 
already. As to the almost forgotten Tolstoi: if what is 
called "realism" is dramatic, then Tolstoi, like a photo- 
graph, is dramatic. Certainly, in this view, a photograph is 
more dramatic than an oil painting. But one is perhaps to 
be allowed his taste in photographs? One might, for ex- 
ample, prefer a photograph of his mother or of his lady-love 
to a photograph of a dog fight or a pig-sticking ; though the 
latter, of course, everybody would pronounce much the more 
dramatic. The fad poetic, in itself, is perfectly innocuous: 
the only possible danger is, that young persons are often led 
by it into the belief that any thing which is unpleasant or 
repulsive, or which has the taste of forbidden fruit, — any 
thing, in short, with which literature as a rule does not deal 
largely, or as to which the less said the better, — is dramatic. 
It is because I believe in the Shakespeare Society, and be- 
cause it is to be feared that the Shakespeare Society (as an 
Institution) may be thoughtlessly confounded, in the minds 
of some, with this fad poetic (as an Institution), that I have 



THE SOCIETY AND THE "FAD." 19 

attempted to here briefly dwell upon a few points wherein 
they differ. 

Let us repeat. There is much that is coarse in the pano- 
rama of Shakespeare: but it is there, in its place, and does 
not dwarf the rest; nor is it the coarseness, any more than 
(to speak mildly) any other single feature of his dramas, 
which has made Shakespeare immortal. What is dirty is 
not on that account dramatic; it certainly is not on that ac- 
count scientific. We may all of us enjoy Brown, Jones, 
and Robinson; but, keenly as we may enjoy them, Brown, 
Jones, and Robinson are not, from the mere fact that we do 
enjoy them, yet (I quote again from the young ladies' mag- 
azine), " the only really dramatic poets of the century." As 
to that, it would seem rather the province of the centuries 
which come after Brown, Jones, and Robinson, to judge. 

I believe that the great verdicts as to who are, and who are 
not, great, — great poets, great dramatists, great masters of 
any art, — whose mortal labors deserve and justify and satis- 
fy the founding of great societies, — are always, always have 
been, and always will be, based upon some such proposition 
as has been considered here. I believe that any thing which 
survives its own century must have something of the prac- 
tical (of the scientific if you will) about it — even if it be a 
work of the imagination pure and simple. I believe that 
the verdict of the centuries as to who are, and who are not, 
dramatic poets, will be always based on just such tests 
as the centuries so far have applied to William Shakespeare. 
Were the " shapes" — to which his pen turned " things un- 
known " — actual and practical? Have we seen them with our 
own physical eyes? We know that the pages of Shakespeare 
have stood these tests, and that they have proved Shake- 
speare's poetry to be an orderly, symmetrical, proportionate, 
and absolutely true, chronicle of his own age and vicinage: 
not lifted into the clouds beyond the realm of human na- 
ture's daily food; glorified by an imagination none the less 



20 THE SOCIETY AND THE ' ' FAD. * ' 

suoerb because not hectic, — an imagination which " bodied 
forth'' forms, not chimeras; and truths, not fantasies. And 
I believe that it is because Shakespeare is the poet of the true 
and the living, rather than of the didactic and the transcen- 
dental, that he is perennial and immortal. 



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THE SOCIETY AND THE " FAD." 

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